_camisa_ was taken indifferently for shirt or chemise. And hence arose
the term _camisado_ for a night-attack, in which the assailants
recognised each other in the dark by their white shirt-sleeves,
sometimes further distinguished by a tight cincture of broad black
riband. The last literal camisado, that I remember, was a nautical
one--a cutting-out enterprise somewhere about 1807-8.]
No _suppression_ of the religious houses had originally been designed;
nothing more than a searching _visitation_. And at this moment, yes,
at this present midsummer of 1856, waiting and looking forward to the
self-same joyful renewal of leases that then was looked for in
England, but not improbably, alas! summoned to the same ineffable
disappointment as fell more than three centuries back upon our own
England--lies, waiting for her doom, a great kingdom in central
Europe. She, and under the same causes, may chance to be disappointed.
What was it that caused the tragic convulsion in England? Simply this:
regular and healthy visitation having ceased, infinite abuses had
arisen; and these abuses, it was found at last, could not be healed by
any measure less searching than absolute suppression. Austria, as
regards some of her provinces, stands in the same circumstances at
this very moment. Imperfect visitations, that cleansed nothing, should
naturally have left her religious establishments languishing for the
one sole remedy that was found applicable to the England of 1540. And
what was _that_? It was a remedy that carried along with it
revolution. England was found able in those days to stand that fierce
medicine: a more profound revolution has not often been witnessed than
that of our mighty Reformation. Can Austria, considering the awful
contagions amongst which her political relations have entangled her,
hope for the same happy solution of her case? Perhaps a revolution,
that once unlocks the fountains of blood in central Germany, will be
the bloodiest of all revolutions: whereas, in our own chapters of
revolution even the stormiest, those of the Marian Persecution and of
the Parliamentary War, both alike moved under restraints of law and
legislative policy. The very bloodiest promises of English history
have replied but feebly to the clamour and expectations of cruel or
fiery partisans. Different is the prospect for Austria. From her, and
from the auguries of evil which becloud her else smiling atmosphere,
let us turn back to our own history in this sixteenth century, and
for a moment make a brief inquest into the blood that really was
shed--whether justly or not justly. Bloodshed, as an instinct--bloodshed,
as an appetite--raged like a monsoon in the French Revolution, and many
centuries before in the Rome of Sylla and Marius--in the Rome of the
Triumvirate, and generally in the period of Proscriptions. Too fearfully
it is evident that these fits of _acharnement_ were underlaid and fed by
paroxysms of personal cruelty. In England, on the other hand, foul and
hateful as was the Marian butchery, nevertheless it cannot be denied
that this butchery rested entirely upon principle. Homage offered to
anti-Lutheran principles, in a moment disarmed the Popish executioner.
Or if (will be the objection of the reflecting reader)--if there are
exceptions to this rule, these must be looked for amongst the king's
enemies. And the term 'enemies' will fail to represent adequately those
who, not content with ranking themselves wilfully amongst persons
courting objects irreconcilable to the king's interests, sought to
exasperate the displeasure of Henry by special insults, by peculiar
mortifications, and by complex ingratitude. Foremost amongst such cases
stands forward the separate treason of Anne Boleyn, mysterious to this
hour in some of its features, rank with pollutions such as European
prejudice would class with Italian enormities, and by these very
pollutions--literally by and through the very excess of the
guilt--claiming to be incredible. Neither less nor more than this which
follows is the logic put into the mouth of the Lady Anne Boleyn:--From
the mere enormity of the guilt imputed to me, from that very abysmal
stye of incestuous adultery in which now I wallow, I challenge as of
right the presumption that I am innocent; for the very reason that I am
loaded in my impeachment with crimes that are inhuman, I claim to be no
criminal at all. Because my indictment is revolting and monstrous,
therefore is it incredible. The case, taken apart from the person, would
not (unless through its mysteriousness and imperfect circumstantiation)
have attracted the interest which _has_ given it, and _will_ in all time
coming continue to give it, a root in history amongst insoluble or
doubtfully soluble historical problems. The _case_, being painful and
shocking, would by readers generally have long since been dismissed to
darkness. But the _person_, too critically connected with a vast and
immortal revolution, will for ever call back the case before the
tribunals of earth. The mother of Queen Elizabeth, the mother of
Protestantism in England, cannot be suffered--never _will_ be
suffered--to benefit by that shelter of merciful darkness which, upon
any humbler person, or even upon this person in any humbler case, might
be suffered to settle quietly as regards the memory of her acts. Mr.
Froude, a pure-minded man, is the last man to call back into the glare
of a judicial inquest deeds of horror, over which eternal silence should
have brooded, had such an issue been possible. But three centuries of
discussion have made _that_ more and more impossible. And now,
therefore, with a view to the improvement of the dispute, and, perhaps,
in one or two instances, with a chance for the rectification of the
'_issues_' (speaking juridically) into which the question has been
allowed to lapse, Mr. Froude has in some degree re-opened the
discussion. 'The guilt,' he says, 'must rest where it is due. But under
any hypothesis guilt there _was_--dark, mysterious, and most miserable.'
Tell this story how you may, and the evidence remains of guilt under
_any_ hypothesis--guilt such as in Grecian tragedy was seen thousands
of years ago hanging in clouds of destiny over princely houses, and
reading to them a doom of utter ruin, root and branch, in which, as in
the anarchy of hurricanes, no form or feature was descried
distinctly--nothing but some dim fluctuating phantom, pointing with
recording finger to that one ancestral crime through which the
desolation had been wrought.
Mr. Froude, through his natural sense of justice, and his deep study
of the case, is unfavourably disposed towards the Lady Anne Boleyn:
nevertheless he retains lingering doubts on her behalf, all of which,
small and great, we have found reason to dismiss. We, for our parts,
are thoroughly convinced of her guilt. Our faith is, that no shadow of
any ground exists for suspending the verdict of the sentence; but at
the same time for mitigating that sentence there arose this strong
argument--namely, that amongst women not formally pronounced idiots,
there never can have been one more pitiably imbecile.
There is a mystery hanging over her connection with the king which
nobody has attempted to disperse. We will ourselves suggest a few
considerations that may bring a little coherency amongst the scattered
glimpses of her fugitive court life. The very first thought that
presents itself, is a sentiment, that would be pathetic in the case of
a person entitled to more respect, upon the brevity of her public
career. Apparently she lost the king's favour almost in the very
opening of her married life. But in what way? Not, we are persuaded,
through the king's caprice. There was hardly time for caprice to have
operated; and her declension in favour from that cause would have been
gradual. Time there was none for her beauty to decay--neither _had_ it
decayed. We are disposed to think that in a very early stage of her
intercourse with the king, she had irritated the king by one
indication of mental imbecility rarely understood even amongst medical
men--namely, the offensive habit of laughing profusely without the
least sense of anything ludicrous or comic. Oxford, or at least one of
those who shot at the Queen, was signally distinguished by this habit.
Without reason or pretext, he would break out into causeless laughter,
not connected with any impulse that he could explain. With this
infirmity Anne Boleyn was plagued in excess. On the 2nd of May, 1536,
the very first day on which she was made aware of the dreadful
accusations hanging over her good name and her life, on being
committed to the Tower, and taken by Sir William Kingston, the
governor, to the very same chambers in which she had lain at the
period of her coronation, she said, 'It' (meaning the suite of rooms)
'is too good for me; Jesu, have mercy on me;' next she kneeled down,
'weeping a great space.' Such are Sir William's words; immediately
after which he adds, 'and in the same sorrow fell into a great
laughing.' A day or two later than this, she said, 'Master Kingston,
shall I die without justice?'--meaning, it seems, would she be put to
death without any judicial examination of her case; upon which Sir
William replied, 'The poorest subject the king hath, had
justice'--meaning, that previously to such an examination of his case,
he could not by regular course of justice be put to death. Such was
the question of the prisoner--such was the answer of the king's
representative. What occasion was here suggested for rational
laughter? And yet laughter was her sole comment. 'Therewith,' says Sir
William, 'she laughed.' On May 18th, being the day next before that of
her execution, she said, 'Master Kingston, I hear say I shall not die
afore noon; and I am very sorry therefore, for I thought to be dead by
this time, and past my pain.' Upon this Sir William assured her 'it
should be no pain, it was so subtle;' meaning that the stroke of a
sword by a powerful arm, applied to a slender neck, could not meet
resistance enough to cause any serious pain. She replied, 'I heard say
the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck;' after which
she laughed heartily. Sir William so much misunderstood this laughter,
which was doubtless of the same morbid and idiotic character as all
the previous cases, that he supposes her to have had 'much joy and
pleasure in death,' which is a mere misconstruction of the case. Even
in the very act of dying she could not check her smiling, which
assuredly was as morbid in its quality and origin as what of old was
known as '_risus sardonicus_.'
Carrying along with us, therefore, a remembrance of this repulsive
habit, which argues a silliness so constitutional, and noting also the
obstinate (almost it might be called the brutal) folly with which,
during the last seventeen days of her life, she persisted in
criminating herself, volunteering a continued rehearsal of
conversations the most profligate, under a mere instinct of gossiping,
we shall begin to comprehend the levity which no doubt must have
presided in her conversations with the king. Too evidently in a court
but recently emerging from barbarism, there was a shocking defect of
rules or fixed ceremonial for protecting the dignity of the queen and
of her female attendants. The settlement of any such rules devolved
upon the queen herself, in default of any traditional system; and
unhappily here was a queen without sense, without prudence, without
native and sexual dignity for suggesting or upholding such restraints,
and whose own breeding and experience had been purely French. Strange
it was that the king's good sense, or even his jealousy, had not
peremptorily enjoined, as a caution of mere decency, the constant
presence of some elderly matrons, uniting rank and station with
experience and good sense. But not the simplest guarantees for
ordinary decorum were apparently established in the royal household.
And the shocking spectacle was daily to be seen, of a young woman,
singularly beautiful, atrociously silly, and without common
self-respect, styling herself Queen of England, yet exacting no more
respect or homage than a housemaid, suffering young men, the most
licentious in all England, openly to speculate on the contingency of
her husband's death, to talk of it in language the coarsest, as
'waiting for dead men's shoes,' and bandying to and fro the chances
that this man or that man, according to the whim of the morning,
should 'have her,' or should _not_ 'have her'--that is, have the
reversion of the queen's person as a derelict of the king. All this,
though most injurious to her prospects, was made known by Anne Boleyn
herself to the female companions who were appointed to watch her
revelations in prison. And certainly no chambermaid ever rehearsed her
own colloquies with these vile profligates in a style of thinking more
abject than did at this period the female majesty of England.
Listening to no accuser, but simply to the unsolicited revelations of
the queen herself, as she lay in bed amongst her female attendants in
the Tower, every man of sense becomes aware, that if these
presumptuous young libertines abstained from daily proposals to the
queen of the most criminal nature, _that_ could arise only from the
reserve and suspicion incident to a state of rivalship, and not from
any deference paid to the queen's personal pretensions, or to her
public character.
Three years, probably one-half of that term, had seen the beginning,
the decay, and the utter extinction of the king's affection for Anne.
It is known now, and at the time it had furnished a theme for
conjecture, that very soon after his marriage the king manifested
uneasiness, and not long after angry suspicions, upon matters
connected with the queen. We have no doubt that she herself, whilst
seeking to amuse the king with fragments of her French experiences,
had, through mere oversight and want of tact, unintentionally betrayed
the risks to which her honour had been at times exposed. Without
presence of mind, without inventive talent or rapidity of artifice,
she would often compromise herself, and overshoot her momentary
purposes of furnishing amusement to the king. He had heard too much.
He believed no longer in her purity. And very soon, as a natural
consequence, she ceased to interest him. The vague wish to get rid of
her would for some time suggest no hopeful devices towards such a
purpose. For some months, apparently, he simply neglected her. This
neglect unhappily it was that threw her unprotected upon the vile
society of young libertines. Two of these--Sir Henry Norris and Sir
Francis Weston--had been privileged friends of the king. But no
restraints of friendship or of duty had checked their designs upon the
queen. Either special words, or special acts, had been noticed and
reported to the king. Thenceforward a systematic watch had been
maintained upon all parties. Discoveries more shocking than anybody
looked for had been made. The guilty parties had been careless: blind
themselves, they thought all others blind; but, during the April of
1536, the Privy Council had been actively engaged in digesting and
arranging the information received.
On May-day, the most gladsome day in the whole year, according to the
usages of that generation, the dreadful news transpired of the awful
accusations and the impending trials. Smeton, a musician, was the only
person not of gentlemanly rank amongst the accused. He was accused of
adultery with the queen; and he confessed the offence; never
retracting that part of his confession. In discussing the
probabilities of the case, it is necessary to use special and
extraordinary caution. The confession, for instance, of Anne herself
has been treated as hollow and unmeaning; because, it is alleged, the
king's promise of indulgence and favour to her infant daughter was
purchased under the condition of confession. It is clear that such a
traffic would not have been available except in special and
exceptional cases. As to Smeton, he did not at all meet the king's
expectations, except as to the one point of confessing the adultery.
Consequently, as he was quite disinterested, had nothing at all to
gain, and did gain nothing by his confession, _him_ we are obliged to
believe. On the other hand, the _non_-confession of some amongst the
gentlemen, if any there were that steadfastly adhered to this
non-confession, proves nothing at all; since _they_ thought it perfidy
to confess such a case against a woman. Meantime, Constantyne, a known
friend of Sir H. Norris and of Sir W. Brereton, two of the four
gentlemen accused, declares that, for himself, being a Protestant, and
knowing the queen's secret leaning to that party, he and all other
'friends of the gospel' could not bring themselves to believe that the
queen had behaved so abominably. 'As I may be saved before God,' he
says, 'I could not believe it, afore I heard them speak at their
death. But on the scaffold, in a manner _all_ confessed, unless
Norris; and as to _him_, what he said amounted to nothing.' The truth
is, there occurred in the cases of these gentlemen a dreadful
struggle. The dilemma for _them_ was perhaps the most trying upon
record. Gallantry and manly tenderness forbade any man's confessing,
for a certain result of ruin to a woman, any treasonable instances of
love which she had shown to him. Yet, on the other hand, to deny was
to rush into the presence of God with a lie upon their lips. Hence the
unintelligible character of their final declarations. Smeton, as no
gentleman, was hanged. All the other four--Norris, Brereton, Weston,
and Rochford--were beheaded. The four gentlemen and Smeton suffered
all on the same day--namely, Wednesday, the 17th of May. Of all the
five, Sir W. Brereton was the only one whose guilt was doubted. Yet he
was the most emphatic in declaring his own guilt. If he could die a
thousand deaths, he said, all would be deserved.
But the crime of all the rest seemed pale by the side of Rochford's.
He had been raised to the peerage by Henry, as an expression of his
kindness to the Boleyn family. He was the brother of Anne; and whilst
the others had offended by simple adultery with Anne, _his_ crime was
incestuous adultery; and his dying words appeared (to the _auditors_),
'if not,' says Mr. Froude, 'a confession, yet something too nearly
resembling it.'
From such dreadful offences, all readers are glad to hurry away; yet
in one respect this awful impeachment has a reconciling effect. No
reader after this wishes for further life to Anne. For her own sake it
is plain that through death must lie the one sole peaceful solution of
her unhappy and erring life. Some people have most falsely supposed
that the case against the brother and sister, whatever might be
pronounced upon the four other cases, laboured under antecedent
improbabilities so great as to vitiate, or to load with suspicion, the
entire case of the Privy Council. But, on the contrary, the shocking
monstrosity of the charge strengthens the anti-Boleyn impeachment. As
a means for getting rid of Anne, the Rochford case was not at all
needed. If it could even in dreams be represented as false, the injury
offered to the Boleyns, whilst quite superfluous for any purpose of
Henry's, would be too atrocious an outrage upon truth and natural
justice for human nature to tolerate. The very stones would mutiny
against such a calumny coming as a crown or crest to other injuries
separately unendurable, if they could once be regarded as injuries at
all. Under these circumstances, what should we think of a call upon
Lord Berkshire, the very father of Anne Boleyn, to sit as one of the
judges upon the cases. Not, indeed, upon the cases of his son and his
daughter; from such Roman trials of fortitude he was excused; but on
the other cases he was required to officiate as one of the judges.
And, in fact, the array of rank and splendour, as exhibited in the
persons of those who composed the court, surpassed anything previously
known in England. On the part of the crown, it was too keenly felt
that the deep personal interest of the king, in obtaining liberty to
form a new marriage connection with Jane Seymour, would triumphantly
outweigh all the justice that ever could be arrayed against the two
Boleyns. Nothing could win a moment's audience for the royal cause,
except an unparalleled and matchless splendour in the composition of
the court. This, therefore, was secured. Pretty nearly the whole
peerage of that period was embattled upon the bench of judges.
Meantime, the tragedy, so far as the queen is concerned, took a turn
which convicts all parties of a blunder; of a blunder the most
needless and superfluous. This blunder was exposed by Bishop Burnet
about a hundred and fifty years later, but most insufficiently
exposed; and to this hour it has not been satisfactorily cleared up.
Let us pursue the arrears of the case. The four gentlemen, together
with Mark Smeton, were executed (as we have seen) on Wednesday, the
17th of May, 1536. Two days later Queen Anne Boleyn was brought out at
noonday upon the verdant lawn within the Tower, and with very slight
ceremonies she suffered decapitation. A single cannon-shot proclaimed
to London and Westminster the final catastrophe of this unhappy
romance. Anne had offered not one word of self-vindication on this
memorable occasion; and, if her motive to so signal a forbearance were
really consideration for the interests of her infant daughter, it must
be granted that she exhibited, in the farewell act of her life, a
grandeur of self-conquest which no man could have anticipated. For
this act she has never received the homage which she deserved; whilst,
on the other hand, praise most unmerited has been given for three
centuries to the famous letter of self-defence which she is reputed to
have addressed to the king at the opening of her trial. This letter,
beyond all doubt a forgery, was first brought into effectual notice by
the _Spectator_ somewhere about 1710; and, whether authentic or not,
is most injudiciously composed. It consists of five paragraphs, each
one of which is pulling distractedly in contradictory directions.
Meantime, that or any other act of Anne Boleyn's was superseded by a
fatal discovery, which changed utterly the relations of all parties,
which in effect acquitted Anne of treason, and which summarily
rehabilitated as untainted subjects of the king those five men who had
suffered death in the character of traitors. The marriage of Anne to
the king, it was suddenly discovered, had from the beginning been
void. It is true that we have long ceased to accredit those objections
from precontracts, &c., which in the papal courts would be held to
establish a nullity. But we are to proceed by the laws as then
settled. Grounds of scruple, which would now raise at most a mere case
of irregularity, at that time, unless met _ab initio_ by a papal
dispensation, did legally constitute a flaw such as even a friendly
pope could not effectually cure; far less that angry priest, blazing
up with wrath, and at intervals meditating an interdict, who at
present occupied the chair of St. Peter. Here was a discovery to make,
after so much irreparable injustice had been already perpetrated! If
(which is too certain), under the marriage laws then valid, Anne
Boleyn never had been the lawful wife of Henry, then, as Bishop Burnet
suddenly objected when too late by one hundred and fifty years, what
became of the adultery imputed to Anne, and the five young courtiers?
Not being the king's wife, both _she_ was incapable in law of
committing adultery as against the king, and by an inevitable
consequence _they_ were incapable of participating in a crime which
she was incapable of committing.